numbers of persian leopards have considerably decreased in recent years and for this reason it has been categorized as endangered in the iucn classification. habitat destruction is believed to be the main cause of the species population decline. hence, attempts to preserve the remaining habitats of this kind of animal effectively are deemed essential in reversing its downgrading trend. to hit t...

jajrood protected complex (khojir and sorkheh hesar national parks and jajrood protected area) is one of the most important habitats of central alborz wild sheep (ovis gmelini x o. vignei) in iran. since the species mate in fall, then fall home range has critical rule in life cycle of this species. using the ecological niche factor analysis (enfa), effective factors on the presence of species w...

brown bear (ursus arctos) is one of the most important carnivores in iran. however, information on its habitat associations is scared. based on ecological niche factor analysis (enfa) method, a summer habitat suitability model was developed for this species in the southern part of alborz protected area. our results showed that, brown bears prefer higher altitudes and northern aspects in their p...

The ecological niche is a prominent theoretical concept in many ecological fields, central to ecological understanding of species interactions and community structure. To better understand this important concept, and the impact it has had on ecology, we used a citation analysis to examine the history of the niche through citation patterns during the 20th century. In particular, we sought to doc...

The Mahalanobis distances have been introduced in habitat selection studies for the estimation of environmental suitability maps (ESMs). The pixels of raster maps of a given area correspond to points in the multidimensional space defined by the mapped environmental variables (ecological space). The Mahalanobis distances measure the distances in this space between these points and the mean of th...

Roles of ecological processes in evolution are attracting much attention in evolutionary studies. Learning and niche construction are regarded as ecological processes that can affect the course of evolution directly or indirectly. However, the effects of mutual interactions between them on evolution are still poorly understood. Our purpose is to provide insight into the coevolutionary dynamics ...

5 Introduction Background 6 Comparison of predictive ability between modelling techniques 9 ‘False’ Absences 11 Study area 11 The harbour porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) 12 Materials and Methods Data collection 13 Estimating position of sightings 14 Track and surveyed grid cells 14 Presence and Absence cells 15 Data partitioning 16 Ecogeographic data 16 1) PCA-based technique 17 PCA-intra-model ev...